


The Rourke Experiment

by Leotto



Category: Long Gone Days (Video Game)
Genre: Baby finding out what kissing means, Canon Divergent, Experimentation, F/M, First Kiss, Kissing, M/M, pre-chapter 4 release
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:15:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25417546
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leotto/pseuds/Leotto
Summary: Quick short story exploring the perspective of someone who hasn't experienced the conventional human contact before, and discovering the joy of 'kissing'.
Relationships: Adair & Rourke (Long Gone Days), Adair/Rourke (Long Gone Days), Rourke & Ivan, Rourke & Lynn
Comments: 8
Kudos: 24





	The Rourke Experiment

**Author's Note:**

> Taking place in a canon-divergent AU where they don't have to leave Kaliningrad in a hurry.

It had been a few days since Rourke and Adair decided to settle down in Kaliningrad for a while. There was no sign of the Core being aware of their whereabouts, and they needed a moment and a place for a breather, so they could adjust to the life on the surface. Ivan was more than generous to offer them a place to stay and they are happy to accept. It was a pleasant surprise that the people on the surface weren't as bad as the Core made them out to be, and they were given a daily reminder of how great their misconceptions had been. One of the few things that perplexed Rourke beyond his imagination were the variation of ways the people expressed their affection through physical contact. Even in the Core, he had seen people shake or hold hands to show their gratitude or appreciation, though the latter wasn’t always encouraged, so he was vaguely aware of the fact that there were bodily ways of expressing oneself. Actually seeing it in action, however, caught him off guard.

The one particular action that had him most intrigued and confused was the meeting of one’s lips onto someone else's body parts, or otherwise known as, kissing.

At first, it started innocuously. One morning, he went for a walk and saw the old lady next door, Gleb's mother, sending her grandchildren off to school. She hugged them, then kissed their forehead, then both cheeks, then on top of their fuzzy little heads, before they could wiggle out of her arms. The kids were laughing and beaming to this much attention from grandma, but the boy sometimes looked like he wanted to squirm away if she put too much saliva on his face. Nevertheless, the giver and the receiver of the kiss appreciated it and enjoyed the contact, it seemed. Rourke made a mental note of this.

A few days later, he was on an errand to pick up some apples from the grocery store, and saw a man and a woman sitting on the edge of the fountain. She had a fresh bouquet of flowers in her hand and it matched the color of her dress. They looked happy. She looked even happier when he had lifted her hand gently from her lap and kissed the back of her hand. The contact didn't last long, nor did it seem distracting and amusing like the way Gleb's mother was kissing her grandchildren. Yet she was smiling from ear to ear, between her reddened cheeks. Rourke surmised that perhaps this kind of kiss had the effect to warm them up. There was a slight chill in the winds and she was wearing a very billowy dress after all. His suspicions are confirmed when the man put both of his arms around her to keep her body temperature up.

Rourke didn't stick around to watch them much longer, because they weren't moving at all for the past few minutes for him to make any kind of meaningful observation out of this. And if he stuck around longer, Lynn would send a search party after him like she did last time. He blamed the cats for being too cute, but didn't think the same excuse would work this time.

Next opportunity came one evening, when he was invited to watch a movie with Ivan, Lynn and Adair. They had gathered various snacks and drinks like popcorn, chips, beer and soda and brought them to the small coffee table. When they had all sat, squeezed in on the couch, Lynn threw a blanket over their laps and Ivan turned off all the light. The room was now completely dark except for the faint blue light coming off the screen. Ivan said this makes it seem like they were at a movie theater. Rourke had never been to a theater before. He thought this set up reminded him of the lecture hall where he would get mission briefings. He hoped the movie they'd be watching would be less formal than Sergeant Major's drawn out lectures. Lynn said the movie was a type of a romcom. It didn't sound much like a communication movie, for how often the protagonists misunderstood each other through the duration of two hours.

The part that stuck out for him though, was when the two protagonists finally met each other despite all the miscommunication of their own making and pulled each other into a hug. The music changed to something slow and stringy and the camera angle kept twirling around that it made Rourke dizzy. The actors put their faces really close to each other's and looked into the eyes a lot. Then they finally moved the last little bit and their lips were touching. Odd, Rourke thought. It would be easier to make their nose make contact first. They are the ones poking out of the face the most, after all. Then he dawned on him that this was another type of kiss, when he saw the smile bloom across the one of the actors’ faces. He was glued to the screen and really watched the way the lips slid across each other and, and-- is that a tongue moving back and forth?

He looked around the room to gauge the reaction of his friends; Lynn seemed to be really engrossed in what she was watching and had the blanket pulled all the way up to her chin; Ivan had a little smile on his face and took a slow sip from his bottle of beer; and Adair - well - Adair looked just as perplexed as he was, and was glaring at the screen with a little frown on his forehead. He looked like he was going to object to the viewing any second now. Rourke shrugged and looked at the actors on the screen again. There it was, that look he had seen time and time again, in association with the kiss. They looked so happy, like their entire life was in bliss. He had never seen anyone else look so happy as they did right now.

Rourke decided that he wanted to experience this happiness for himself. This 'kissing' business must be an amazing action if it makes so many people happy. Well, there was only one way to find out.

After the movie was over, everyone started stretching from where they sat, or stood up to stretch their legs, and talked about the parts of the movie they enjoyed. Lynn looked over at him and asked,

"What about you, Rourke? How was your first experience with a romcom?"

He gave it to her straight.

"I think I want to try it for myself." Before she could ask what he meant, he leaned in and kissed her cheek.

There was some kind of flabbergasted sound coming from Lynn's general direction and he thought he heard Ivan spit out his beer, then promptly started coughing.

"Uh... Rourke? Are you alright?" Lynn asked, ignoring the deathly sound coming from behind them.

"Yeah! I thought doing this would make people happy, so I thought I'd give it a try..." Then he looked at Lynn. She didn't look particularly happy, only surprised and maybe a little uncomfortable.

"Sorry if I didn't do that right. I can.. I can try again." Before he could, Lynn waved and pulled her hands away.

"Nonono, it's perfectly fine. I'm happy, Rourke. I'm glad you, uh, think about me enough to want to make me happy. Really, I appreciate it. But, um, I- I think I'm going to say good night now. See you tomorrow!" She picked up her blanket and fled the scene, pulling it off of people who still remained seated. She looked like a little bat running away deeper into the cave at the first ray of sunlight. Rourke was left pondering if he really did something wrong.

"Hey, Ivan?" He turned to look at Ivan, who was recovering from his recent bouts of coughing and he looked at Rourke gingerly.

"Yeah, what's up?" His voice was a little hoarse and shivered from the sudden lack of warmth Lynn removed from him. Rourke moved in and sat down next to Ivan. He lifted the hand that didn't have a death grip on an almost empty bottle and kissed the back of it lightly. Ivan paused, watching Rourke in stupefied surprise for a moment. When the redhead looked up at him, he slowly pulled his hand back as if he was really trying not to hurt Rourke's feelings. He had got a small awkward smile on his face, like the time when he was trying to explain to one of the kids at the daycare why they could not jump from the second story window and fly.

"Does it... does it not make you happy... and warm you up? You were cold just now, and I thought..." Rourke fidgeted with his fingers while trying to remember what was different between what he did and the pair he had seen by the fountain a few days ago. The older man smiled at Rourke carefully with a knowing look dawning on him.

"Actually I am. It makes me happy to know that you care enough about me to make me happy. Thank you." Rourke smiled back a little, but didn't feel better about it. Lynn had said similar things, but she still ran away afterwards.

"But you need to be careful how you express yourself with kisses, Rourke. It's a... very intimate gesture. Some people can take it the wrong way, if you aren't careful."

He was confused as to why that was the case, and wanted to ask. As if he could hear Rourke's thoughts, Ivan raised a hand and stopped him before he could start.

"It's going to be a long story, and it's late tonight. Why don't you have a good night's rest and I'll tell you more in detail tomorrow?" Rourke had no choice but to nod and bid Ivan a good night.

After the older man made his slow but sure escape, Rourke felt disappointed about the results he had gotten from his little experiments. He began picking up after his mess and put a few empty bottles in the kitchen, only to find Adair giving him odd looks.

"Hey, are you alright?" Adair asked, and frankly, Rourke felt a little confused now that he was being asked. "I think... so? Why do you ask?" Adair held his gaze a while, then sighed.

"I know what you've been trying to do. You were testing out the surface customs again, just like the time you tested if staring at the sun will make you sneeze. I really don't need to tell you that getting a mild image burn in the retina is a bad idea. On the same note, I don't really need to know all the customs behind kissing to realize that you aren't supposed to go around kissing everyone in one sitting like that." Adair commented like he was telling him something so basic, like loading the gun before shooting the target.

"I think it's supposed to be... special." The medic added like it was an afterthought.

"But all my friends are special. I like Lynn, Ivan and you. I wouldn't be here today without any one of you." Rourke replies seriously, not budging his opinion about this.

Adair put a hand on his temple and pressed it slightly. "I think it's a little different than that."

"How so? You need to explain yourself a little more." Rourke was now down right being impossible.

"I don't know! How should I be able to explain something I don't know myself? I think it's supposed to be special! That's what I gather from the context of the things I've seen so far where kissing is involved." Adair retorted in frustration and made a move to leave the common area.

"Hey," Rourke called him before he can say good night, though, "then why don't we find out?"

"You gotta be kidding me. Didn't you hear a word I said, Rourke? It has to be speci--" He was interrupted when Rourke pulled him around, and Adair dropped a book he had in his hands. They were standing face to face in a dark house with no light on other than the glowing lamp from the street outside. All they could see were each other's silhouette and the small sparkle in their eyes.

"There's no one more special to me than you, Adair." Rourke meant it like having a best friend who escaped a dangerous paramilitary organization together with, who was quite possibly the only one who would really understand where he came from. That was a pretty special situation right? Rourke didn't know that Adair had stopped breathing for a moment, at how his voice sounded so close to his ears.

"...you don't know what you are talking about." He tried to stop Rourke and his weird experiment and walk away, but Rourke had his arms around his back now, and he couldn't walk away without using force.

"Would you stop talking for a second? It's really hard to put it on right when you just won't stop talking."

"Rourke, I swear t---"

Adair felt something soft and warm press into his lips and he could help but to stop talking. The sensation he had never felt before shocked him into silence, but it was the shiver that ran down his spin that kept him there. He wasn't entirely sure when he had closed his eyes. It didn't really matter though. It was really dark here.

The contact didn't last very long, but the warmth lingered for far longer even after they pulled apart. Rourke was the first one to break the silence. "Uh, mmm. I think I get what you mean by doing this with someone special." Adair had the back of his hand pressed on the lips. He could feel his cheeks burning.

He tried to gather his composure before he spoke again. "See? Even when I don't know things, I know more than you. It would serve you right to listen to me for once." But he didn't sound as confident as his words ought to make him sound. Before the silence could stretch too far, Adair attempted once again to make his escape to his room, then he heard Rourke call his name again.

"Adair?"

"...yeah?"

"I think it was special because it was you."

**Author's Note:**

> This is an idea that started from the Long Gone Days Discord - AU channel, and put to use when a group of us tried Word Sprint. Big thanks to Aquaticnaho for being an inspiration, and Crow, E and Ais for being a motivation! My first published work in the fandom and hope to write more. See you around!


End file.
